REVIEW: Hecuba, White Bear Theatre ✭✭✭

Hecuba

White Bear, Kennington

18/07/15

3 Stars

Euripides still gets short shrift in many quarters by comparison with his senior colleagues in the great Greek dramatic triumvirate - Aeschylus and Sophocles. And yet in many ways his plays speak more directly and immediately to our post-modern sensibilities than do the highly-ravelled, austere, multi-layered explorations of the dilemmas of individual and community in the Oresteia and Theban plays. His deliberate of selection of plots that are slightly aside from the main action draws attention to characters, often female, who are customarily marginalized or ignored in the larger political and military dramas. And his selection of dilemmas or situations that explore extreme states of mind and impossible choices seem closer to the realities of many parts of our modern world than many a well-made play from the last century. We may not literally believe as he did in the Eumenides or Furies as real agents of intervention, but the dramatic tropes of vengeance and of unjustified suffering to ever more unimaginable degrees are depressingly familiar in the news as much as on the stage. For all these reasons, a new production of Hecuba is very welcome and cannot fail to be thought provoking and moving, even when allied to a parallel re-telling of the story in modern guise that often treads on the toes of the original.

Euripides starts his tale at the point when the conventional accounts usually conclude – with the Fall of Troy and the final reckoning between the Greek victors and the Trojan survivors. The focus falls on Queen Hecuba, now Priam’s widow, and already sunk in grief over the loss of the majority of her children and the destruction of the city over which she and her husband presided for decades. Essentially it is two stories in one with both revolving around her increasingly desperate attempts to save her two remaining children, Polyxena and Polydorus. The first has been required as a human sacrifice by the Greeks to balance the sacrifice of Iphigenia before they set sail; and the second she entrusts to the care of a neighbouring king, Polymestor, to keep him out of harm’s way. Needless to say all her schemes to save them go awry. The twists and turns of the plot are in a way less important than the psychological truths that the playwright unveils. He reminds us that the old cliché that suffering and grief ennoble the soul is a sad and delusional piece of wishful thinking. In fact what happens to Hecuba – ‘no worst there is none’ - leads to a kind of madness and disintegration of personality that renders all moral frameworks moot. We are left asking the question of how we can judge somebody who has had to endure the unconscionable loss of all she holds precious, and who then commits what the world would normally judge to be crimes. The boundaries and so-to-speak etiquette of vengeance, its effects on the community, the victims and the perpetrator, were major topics for the Greeks; and so, sadly, they continue to be in our own world, in ways that do not require much transposition.

However, it is the view of the creative team here, writer Chris Vlachopoulos and director Justin Murray, that Hecuba needs reworking for a modern audience. So interwoven with the basic stories are two parallel versions that relocate the action to a modern working-class milieu. In the first story, Hecuba, renamed as Willow, is battling against funding cuts and bureaucracy to obtain medical care and an operation for her otherwise terminally ill daughter; and in the other she finds that her son, whom she thought safe, has been caught up in a demonstration and fatally tasered. She is then faced with dilemma of how to react when she comes face to face with the policeman who bears responsibility for his death. The cast of four, all playing multiple roles, interweave the stories using a minimum of props, and when not performing remain on stage quietly folding strips of newspaper into paper boats.

Now there is nothing wrong with this new updated version, but in performance the boundaries between the two depictions were blurred confusingly, to the detriment of both, and as a result you could not help thinking that each would do better on its own – either a straight version of the Euripides, which in fact would need little adjustment; or the updated version, which on its own would have more room to breathe and develop its characters to their full dimensions. Moreover, there are asymmetries between the two texts, which detract from the intended parallels rather than drawing the ties tighter. In the Greek version, for example, we are always aware of Hecuba’s royal dignity even when derangement looms; indeed it still crucially informs and shapes her conduct. In contrast the demotic context for the new version loses a dimension and the actions of Willow are thereby to a degree more difficult to explain and credit. Moreover, there is inevitably something of a clash of rhetorical styles between the lofty, hieratic tone of the first incarnation and the coarser, in-your-face defiance of the second. The high point of the play is still the exquisite reported account of Polyxena’s dignified defiance of her captors at the moment of sacrifice, which caught the audience’s collective breath more visibly than any of the direct violence taking place on stage.

While I have reservations about the way the play has come together, a lot of credit belongs to the cast for the imagination and intensity with which they put it across. Lucinda Lloyd as Hecuba/Willow offers a wrenchingly committed and remorseless performance with aptly contrasted portrayals of both women. Ben Scheck as both sons and as Polymestor/policeman produces distinctive character roles with a wide emotional range and great physical dynamism. Roisin Keogh plays the daughters with an affecting understatement that acts as an effective foil to Lloyd’s unremitting anger and confrontation – indeed some of the very best writing in the new version lies in the mother-daughter scenes. Isobel Wolff offers a variety of smaller roles with very good handling of the text and carefully calibrated variations in role. Catharsis Theatre are known for their prioritizing of dramatic physical movement and that is certainly a great strength of this production. The White Bear is a tiny space, but it did not seem so in this production, which has a fine flow of action throughout despite the constraints. As a result a play, which could otherwise be quite static and declaratory, moved through its allotted time without any longueurs. Many of the key moments were captured physically as or more powerfully than they were rendered in text. While the end result certainly had its problems, the audience were held in the grip of the drama throughout, and that is a tribute to the flair of the players.